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Big Sandy: Recollection in the Free State
The hollow remains unphotographed.
Memory, not landscape, frames it—
a road cleaving winter in two,
children laughing while gravity
negotiated its own terms.
Neighbors spoke without flourish.
Their kindness was practical,
never advertised, always assumed.
You could leave your grief
on the porch overnight;
someone would tuck it in
and leave bread beside it
by morning.
Coal knew every surname
but never asked for praise.
It shaped the valley,
not into monuments,
but into routine—a quiet survival
where the mines ran deep,
and people deeper.
The river was not ornamental.
It offered proof of summer,
reminding us that coolness
is a gift, not a right.
We swam
because the water didn’t judge.
At the Ball Diamond
we learned ambition and humility
could share a field.
Glory was counted
in grass stains and silence
between innings.
Even now,
the one-lane bridge remains
as metaphor:
we all crossed it—some to school,
some to leave,
some never quite back.
And the friends—
those initial encounters of trust—
they are not forgotten.
They are stitched into the muscle
that resists cynicism.
Big Sandy isn’t quaint.
It is not curated for nostalgia.
It simply was,
and still is—
in the West Virginia dialect of loyalty,
in the rituals of remembering,
in the free state of McDowell County,
in the mythic hush of southern hills,
in who we were
when we first understood
what it meant
to be known.
(Not everything that mattered had words for it.
But the hills kept it well,
and the river still knows the difference
between a story told
and a truth lived.)
Copyright ©
Mickey Grubb
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